>You always need to make partitions >with fdisk before initializing the partition with a filesystem using >mkfs. After creating a Hardware RAID-5 with a 3ware 8506 card -- which comes up as /dev/sda on my machine (my system drive is a single IDE drive, /dev/hda) -- I have found that I AM able to put my filesystem on the RAID without making a partition. I ask this question because I have seen some discussions about some issues with "blockdev" and "block sizes" and how maybe you can get better throughput on devices if they are "higher" up the chain. I.E., /dev/sda is higher than /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. I didn't see any problems "formating" or "putting a file system" on a whole block device like /dev/sda. I ran Bonnie++ on it without issue. (I got the same results as with /dev/sda1 -- but I'm now looking into what I've been reading about blockdev and doing some tuning). But maybe I'm missing some. I'm NOT booting from the RAID. It's just for data storage. By the way, for those with 3ware 8506 cards, at the suggestion of 3ware I tuned the readahead value on my RAID with 'blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sdX' (actually they had recommended this for their forthcoming 9500 series) and my read results with Bonnie++ jumped from 100 to 200 MB/sec on a 8-drive SATA RAID-5 array. I don't yet know how the tuning will affect real world results. Might similar tuning make any difference for Software RAID-5 (I already get 175 MB/sec using the same 3ware card in its JBOD mode). Andy Liebman - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
